


Winter Lives In My Bones

by opheliahyde



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-25
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:21:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opheliahyde/pseuds/opheliahyde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An <i>As I Lay Dying</i> coda. They've already died once, now they can't ever leave him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter Lives In My Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [midnightblack07](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightblack07/gifts).



Vicki falls back on his bed with her arms splayed out wide, grinning up at him like she never left ( _she digs a home in the spaces he left behind, the empty spaces she filled up and glue back together when his heart was broken beyond repair_ ). “Hey, Jer, remember when we got high in the cemetery?” she asks, lifting her arms above her head and arching her back. “Do you remember that party by the falls?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy says, inching into his room, Anna following silently behind ( _more silent now than before, he can’t even hear the lightness of her steps_ ). “Yeah, Vicki, I remember.”

“You left and I almost died, each time. You were trying to save me and I kept getting more broken, until…well, we all know _that_ story,” she says, sitting up and patting the bed for Anna to sit beside her. “What is it with you, Gilbert? You leave death in your wake. Is that why we’re here?”

Jeremy rubs a hand down his face, pressing his fingertips in the grooves between his eyes and skull ( _hoping they might go away if he closes his eyes, hoping this is just some waking nightmare_ ). “I don’t know why you’re here,” he whispers.

He feels cold hands pulling his from his face, thin fingertips underneath his chin tilting his head back. When he opens his eyes, he meets Anna’s familiar ones ( _dark and cold, like the light in them had been extinguished along with her life_ ). “Liar,” she says.

 

 

~~  
~~

Jeremy doesn’t tell anyone ( _there’s no one to listen when Elena takes off with Damon and Alaric was just rebuilding a life for them, and Bonnie wouldn’t listen, mouth firm and set, so sure of her ancestor’s allegiance_ ) and he doesn’t go anywhere because they’ll follow, tugging him back where it’s just the three of them. He thinks, for the first time ( _past vampires, werewolves and witches_ ), that he might be going crazy. In the daylight, their laughter echoes in his ears when he draws, sitting on his bed with their legs folded and Vicki braiding Anna’s hair, combing through the strands like it’s made of smoke ( _and maybe it is, he can touch them and they can touch him, but it doesn’t feel real, it feels like a tingle across his skin whenever they brush their lips over him_ ). At night, he sleeps with them on either side ( _Anna tiny and slight, curled under his arm, with Vicki long and lean, wrapped around him like a vine_ ), cold breaths of air pulling him under.

 

 

 

“Why didn’t you come for me?” Anna asks one day ( _he doesn’t know which, he’s lost track of time now that he’s forsaken reality and given in, they came back to him and he should stop asking why_ ), curling over his back, pressing her cheek against his. “When they took me. Why didn’t you ever try and get me back?”

Jeremy reaches for her hand, folding their fingers together tight in knots. “I couldn’t, I didn’t know where they took you,” he says, lifting her hand and pressing a kiss to her fingertips ( _nobody gets second chances like him, he won‘t waste this one_ ). “I’m sorry.”

Anna pulls away, sliding through his grasp like vapor, then moves in front of him, settling on the floor and looking up at him with vacant eyes. “I shouldn’t have come back. I should have stayed away from this town when I had the chance.”

“Maybe you should have,” he says ( _and it tears at him, fissuring and fracturing the Jeremy he was before, the one her words hit like bullets_ ), then swallows.

She rises up on her knees and lays her palms flat on his thighs, tilting her chin towards him. “Would you have missed me if I never came back?” she asks, her mouth twitching to the side, an almost smile ( _she never smiles anymore, not like she used to, a somber expression has moved in and taken over her face_ ).

“Always.”

The smile cracks open and it’s nothing Jeremy wanted, but she leans up and captures his mouth with hers, before falling downwards and their gazes still set on one another. “I never should have met you,” she whispers, running a finger down the side of her face, cooling the tear track on his cheek. “My weakness.”

 

 

 

Vicki likes to kiss Anna, yanking her towards her and pressing her mouth over hers. They look odd, yet beautiful together ( _Vicki tall and looming over Anna, consuming her as they blend together, golden and mahogany hair creating an entire new shade, two pieces of his past colliding_ ). Vicki grins when she stops, always looking at Jeremy with shark’s teeth and hungry eyes and a beckoning hand.

Jeremy refuses at first, leaving the room ( _they follow like that‘s all they can do, never leaving him in peace when he needs it, not when his insides are shifting around unsettled, making him feel sick and dizzy_ ), but it gets harder and harder when they’re the only people who understand ( _Bonnie breaks up with him when he stops returning her calls and locks himself up in his house; Alaric doesn’t know what to do with him when Jeremy would rather speak to thin air_ ), and he falls into bed with them, sooner rather than later.

It feels like a cold shadow, memories of the times his body moved with theirs, different time but same place ( _Anna sighs in his ear and Vicki sinks her teeth into his shoulder, and he feels it backwards, like a replay of events that happened before, but scrambled and out of order_ ). They don’t belong in the same space and they’re in the wrong time, but they’re here and he can’t let go and they don’t want him to. Anna and Vicki bracket themselves around him like a barricade, no one gets out and no one gets in.

 

 

 

Some days he sits and stares out the window and tries to remember something before this without his heart starting to ache in his chest ( _Elena hasn’t come back, John and Jenna and his parents never reappeared, and Alaric tries and tries but he can never break through_ ), but he can’t and the sun only reminds him of a day when Elena looked up at him with sad eyes ( _and he felt numb, so numb_ ) and said she was sorry he had lost so much. Then Anna will press her lips against his temple and Vicki will fall into his lap and he’ll forget a little while longer.

“We’ll never leave you,” they whisper at night, as the slide under the sheets beside him, “Not again, not ever.”

He believes them ( _with all that he has left, only dwindling fragments of his former self_ ), can’t find the lie on their ghostly breaths. They came back to him and now not even death can take them away.


End file.
